Hacker News Reader

Comment by jotux | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to me that these salary discussions are so narrowly focused on just pay/bonus and don't seem to care about benefits and work/life balance. Here's stuff I track in my own career spreadsheet and compare new jobs against these metrics when considering a new one:

    * Vacation, sick, and holiday time off
    * Distance to work and traffic considerations
    * Relative cost of living
    * Health insurance cost and coverage amount
    * Retirement benefits (401k, pension, etc)
    * Expected work hours per week

View on HN

It's almost like if he wanted to do this and only include salary information he should have called it 'a simple spreadsheet of salaries'.

That way we'd know at least.

But then he asked "Why not" and jotux answered that question.

I read "why not?" as a rhetorical intro, similar to "now presenting!"

Underrated

My comment is directed at these discussions in general. Knowing only salary and bonus just isn't very useful.

That's a very good point. I once applied for a job that had an interesting pay: a little over 100K. But that doesn't tell you anything, right? It's the benefits:

1. 8 days PTO - yeah...seriously, so basically no time off

2. distance to work was about 20-30 minutes -- not bad

3. LOW relative cost of living -- that 100K STRETCHES FAR, unlike in the bay area

4. no health insurance, no coverage

5. no retirement benefits

6. 70-80ish hours (basically late nights + weekends) weeks prior to investor meetings, 60-70ish hours normally

Take it as you may but taking out just one of those points above changes your whole perspective on the job.

I'll never understand the pitiful amount of time off US employees get - here in the UK I get 30 days holiday time a year, and unless I were to utterly take the piss being sick isn't taken out of that, its just accepted as one of those things that happens.

The issue is more people don't even use up the vacation days. People in the states are workaholics. It's competitive, there's the fear of losing their jobs if they are out of the office for too long.

Vacations cost money.

Like pnt12 I don't use much of my holiday time for traditional holidays, but I do tend to take the time off. Some of it will go on simply needing to do things like take my son to a doctor's appointment or other errands, but I've also taken time off to move house, play a new game on release day, and once I took a week off to make some progress on a side project. Having a decent amount of holiday time is great for that sort of thing.

You can spend your vacation time at home, if you don't want to spend money on big trips. Where I live, vacations are 30 days a year but most people only spend around 7 on big trips, or less if they need to save money.

Yeah as a state employee my pay looks low compared to what some of my peers make. When you factor in benefits and 14% in pension contributions not to mention good culture and work-life balance I come out the same (if not ahead IMHO).

I don't know, I'd be getting nervous about state backed pension schemes (assuming that's what you're in).

True, very true.

I'm part of a University system pension scheme that, while operating with a sizable unfunded liability, is fairly stable and has a good outlook. In the end there is a risk but it's difficult to quantify looking out 35 years in the future. I do know better than to take it as a 100% and have eggs in other baskets as well.

As you get older, your view on benefits changes dramatically.

When I was fresh out of college, I had no wife, no kids, no bills, no house. I took all the cool startup perks - free concert tickets, free box tickets to pro sports teams in town, free RedBull, free pop and food, free lunch.

Now in my 30's I have bills, investments, a house mortgage. I went to interview at some smaller startups and established web agencies and they were pitching me on all the "freebies" and I'm thinking, "You know what? Free RedBull doesn't pay my mortgage or my car payment." My view completely changed from taking the handouts to trying to leverage a higher salary in lieu of those things.

You have to remember, you only have so many years where you can burn the candle at several ends and still walk away with your sanity.

Yes I get free redbull, lunches, holidays, accomodation etc. in my job. I can choose what restaurant, what airline, what suburb to live in. To make it easy they just pay me thins thing called "money" which is like a token for all the free stuff. Awesome!

I came to the realisation the other day that I really don't care about free lunch, or free Red Bull, or any of those freebies.

They're not really free, because that money could be otherwise used to pay you. I'd rather get money that I could then spend on lunch, than get free lunch.

"I'd rather get money that I could then spend on lunch, than get free lunch."

In the US, free lunch at work is not considered income for the purposes of taxation [1], but salary that you'd be using towards lunch would be taxed. So, if you eat lunch at work either way, you're going to be getting about 1⅔ as much lunch in-kind as opposed to in salary (assuming marginal 40% state+federal tax).

And that's setting aside the issue of whether it's a good use of your time/energy/willpower to contemplate what/where/how to feed yourself in the middle of your workday.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/119

I guess for me I enjoy getting out of the office and finding lunch. I'd prefer to get a couple of percent less "lunch money" and get the choice to find my own lunch.

It's more that it's a mental and physical break from work, and a good reason to stretch my legs. I can't stand being cooped up in an office for a full 8 hours at a stretch.

>assuming marginal 40% state+federal tax

Very few people in the US pay that.

Agreed! This myopic focus on salary numbers is disheartening. I'd add to the above:

    * culture

It's related to "expected work hours per week" but tells so much more and is probably the single largest contributor to whether or not you'll like working there.

I started a survey site to try and capture some of the non compensation type of information that developers might be interested in, thinking that glassdoor really took care of the monetary type of stuff. http://codehappy.info

This is a little off topic but Thank you for supporting HTTPS. I am glad to see that

https://codehappy.info/ works just fine. (:

Yeah, it's not that much extra work so it seems like something that should just always be done. Plus once you start messing around with any kind of authentication it seems irresponsible not to support it.

Culture means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. There definitely needs to be a mechanism for capturing the energy from a company that a candidate can experience at their leisure. An onsite isn't good for this due the stress of an interview, Glassdoor isn't good due to its bias toward negativity, social media is in the right direction but corporate social networks are usually closed off...

...Perhaps a corporate slack channel that candidates are invited to join?

Do companies typically subscribe to an easy to define culture? Could you give some examples?

The culture is what it is. When you interview, you can probe it, to get the broad strokes, but living in it will be required to know how compatible you are with it. IMO, culture comes from the top and is heavily influenced by the managers in between you and the top.

Seriously this. Salary is NOT everything, and a job that is kicking your butt all day and especially eating into weekends is not worth the tradeoffs. At least, it will catch up with you.

Salary is useful for buying things, up until a point, and at a certain point (assuming you aren't too materialistic) whether you are enjoying the job and other things gets to be way more important, and monetary compensation really doesn't make you that much happier.

Maybe because it's called a simple spreadsheet of salaries. Including that other stuff would make it not just about salaries, and not simple.

So other than that, spot on.

The title of this post is a question: Why not just a simple spreadsheet of salaries?

My comment is addressing this question, and more generally, this recent interest in posting your salary.

Your points are solid regardless. They're just not good criticism of what was created, based on his description.

Still, great ideas on your part.

I read "why not?" as a rhetorical intro, similar to "now presenting!"

I don't think it was a question.

This is why I have stayed at my current company so long. They give us unlimited PTO, free public transit, good 401k matching, good healthcare and the relative cost of living is great. Hours are reasonable and maintaining work life balance is encouraged at all times.

I could leave and probably make quite a bit more, but I don't think all the benefits would come along with it. Also the relative cost of living almost guarantees that even if I did leave, what I pocketed after all expenses would almost certainly be less.

  > They give us unlimited PTO,

This is one of the most pernicious anti-perks around. I'd like 12 months of leave at full pay thanks. This 'perk' actually ends up having the opposite effect. People take less time off because of guilt or lack of confidence in what is a 'reasonable' amount of time off to take.

Tell me exactly the number of days off I can have and make them no questions asked. That way I can clock out and forget that the office exists for 4 weeks or more. At my current employer I have 13 weeks of scheduled paid time off, plus paid paternity leave and 20 paid no questions asked sick/family leave days which roll over from year to year.

Unlimited PTO is a cold hearted, calculated sham which has been designed to screw you over [1][2]

The rest of the benefits you're getting sounds quite good.

[1] - http://www.inc.com/gene-marks/why-unlimited-paid-time-off-is...

[2] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2015/08/26/unlimited-vac...

Edit: Sorry, I didn't read all of your post before I reacted. I see you've said about the same as I have here.

Unedit: The best balance seems to be setting a lower bound. E.g. at my employer we have 25 days PTO minimum, and actually if we don't meet that and leave the company they've contractually obligated themselves to pay that back to you. So we're very much encouraged to hit that limit and it's very common to exceed it.

It really depends on the culture. My managers regularly disappear for a week or two at a time throughout the year. As a result most of us feel free to do do too. That being said I am almost always with laptop in hand to deal with the rare emergency but overall I have been pleased with the arrangement. I probably take 4 weeks or so a year and typically in the past have been limited to two...

13 weeks!? Can you at least give me a hint at which company you work at?

Well here's the rub, I work as a teacher, which is one of the most highly unionised workforces. I feel deeply sorry when I hear about the awful state of employment (in the US in particular). At will employment, 'unlimited' PTO, healthcare tied to employment etc. It's just so dehumanising and hostile. Doubly baffling is the average Joe's seeming distaste for unions.

Here's a sample of the conditions I can enjoy as a teacher here in Australia

$100k salary with guaranteed yearly increases that outpace inflation (this year was a 2.5% increase while inflation is at around 1.6%)

Guilt free, no questions asked sick leave.

Work-life balance. It was trivial for me to apply for part-time work. I now only work Mon-Thu.

Union-led, rolling negotiations for improved pay, working conditions, reductions to work hours etc.

It's the closest thing to a worker's paradise I can think of short of a post work, robot singularity.

Obviously not every profession is subsidized by the government like teaching and therefore can't, by extension, remain competitive while also being so worker friendly.

Even if you're not lucky enough to have such amazing conditions let's all at least call a spade a spade. Things like unlimited PTO are just ways to screw the little guy.

>$100k salary with guaranteed yearly increases that outpace inflation (this year was a 2.5% increase while inflation is at around 1.6%)

I find it hard to believe that people advocate for such fundamentally unsustainable arrangements. Guaranteed raises outpacing inflation that aren't tied to performance at all? Nobody should be surprised when the costs to support a workforce that trends towards mediocrity (why try when you're not rewarded) eventually reach a point that breaks the bank (see California).

It's great that you got a position like that, but an economy cannot survive with a workforce that has massive compensation guaranteed without regard to market forces (see Greece).

You seem unaware that "market forces" do exactly the same thing, with the difference that it's investors and not workers who demand eternal and infinite inflation-beating returns across the entire economy.

I've long suspected that one of the prime dysfunctions of US corporate culture is the projection of greed, puerility, incompetence, and worthlessness by management onto "lower" workers.

In reality the whole point of being a professional is that you get paid well, you produce good results, but it's not just about the money - because you have an ethic of personal pride in your work, and will over-deliver if you're allowed to.

The worst kinds of corporate management in the US spend an incredible amount of time trying to enforce this state in theory, while simultaneously undermining it in practice.

The best kinds of state ownership around the world prove that it can only flourish in a more mature, stable, and sane environment.

its not zero sum, world gdp has been increasing over time for thousands of years, investing can create value out of free things like thoughts, similarly education can create value by training people to think better than they otherwise could

> why try when you are not rewarded

When all are treated the same, regardless of performance, there are two possible situations - either all are rewarded as though underperforming (i.e. raise below inflation), or all are rewarded as though performing well (i.e. raise at or above inflation).

In the former case, my intuition is that your point is probably correct. If I know I'm going to be treated as though I'm the worst employee in the building, I might stop trying after a while.

In the latter case, my intuition is that you are probably wrong. Just because the worst employee is being rewarded as well as I am, it doesn't mean I'll sink to that level.

The intrinsic motivation to do well, improve, and learn all outweigh anything to with competition, and it's a pretty unhealthy culture that relies on the employees competing with their team mates to get them to do their jobs. However, that intrinsic motivation can only go so far when faced with an ever falling budget to maintain your lifestyle.

  >  support a workforce that trends towards mediocrity

This is not an absolute truth. Our standard of teaching is high here in AU, also look to Scandinavian countries to see a highly paid and respected profession with the world's highest educational standards.

  >  but an economy cannot survive with a workforce that has massive compensation guaranteed without regard to market forces

agreed, but surely the free market can find a middle ground between shafting their workforce to their face with 'perks' like 'unlimited' PTO and the admittedly amazing, but not generally applicable conditions that teachers and other public servants enjoy.

Yeah, I scale my salary expectations a lot depending on work conditions. For example, I offer a huge discount for working on free software. On the other side of the coin, these days I'm not sure there is enough money in the world to make me agree to work without doing TDD.

Basically, Nobody has ever offered me less money than I need to live/retire on. Everything else depends on the job for me.

The salary discussions are a very specific tool to provide employees like me intelligence and thus leverage in salary discussions.

"Is this job right for me" is of course far more complex topic but that's not the point of the salary discussion, IMO.

Yeah, the "Additional Comments" are just as interesting to me. For example:

"Expedia sucks! Don't come here ..."

GlassDoor compiles that information. That site seems better for more complex analysis. I think the point of this spreadsheet is for simple analysis.

I strongly distrust glassdoor. A former employer used to ask interns to fill out glassdoor reviews during a t-shirt give out party. Needless to say those were the 5 star ratings all happening on a single day.

Except that this whole wave started not with comparisons of different employers, but comparisons within the same employer (namely, Amazon). If you're trying to get more leverage in salary negotiations once you've already picked an employer, this is very useful information.

I'd probably make a best effort quantify these concerns and put them in their own columns.

Some of those are derivative fields from fields listed in the spreadsheet.

Non-pay benefits are a function of your employer.

Distance to work is a function of where you live and where you work.

Cost of living is generally able to be eyeballed based on the location.

Maybe we can improve the spreadsheet by adding columns for each category that you mentioned (on what is doable) so we can have a more objective view of the benefits.

Having grown up in a laboring community, I don't understand how most of these points are relevant to doing your job. These are just different kinds of compensation.

Like "short-term incentives" aka bonuses, these are just different "shiny objects" aka distractions your employer can wave around to keep you unfocused on some other part of the value exchange, such as no versioning of code or an ancient and unwieldy code base, poorly-maintained infrastructure, not keeping the building warm enough, or "modestly immoral" activities like nepotism.

other data is just harder to crowd source/capture with all the different variations. For a google doc format, less is more.

Also, people don't usually have that stuff memorized, so a quick ad-hoc survey like this would end up with a bunch of nulls and a bunch of incorrect guesses.

That's why this sort of thing needs to be localized-- not just to a company, but to a specific office even.

    * Belief in company's mission, how passionate you are about what they do

Totally agree, especially regarding relative cost of living and work / life balance.

That being said, cost of living is probably the most difficult to asses as there are also many relative variables.

work life balance could probably be assessed simply by an average work week length. I theorize work life balance is affected on an exponential scale with every additional hour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com